Here, we systematically analyzed the evolutionary and disease-associated features of hotspots that overlapped with protein-coding genes.
Such evolutionary dynamics of disease and non-disease genes linked to immunological genes is a bit surprising because disease genes intuitively experience more mutational changes than non-disease genes, yet they are unable to escape the evolutionary pressure.
Researchers have focused on the ecological and evolutionary significance of diseases and disease resistance mechanisms of social insects to better understand the selective pressures that have influenced their social organization and the evolution and maintenance of insect sociality [27], [28].
As such, two new papers have focused on the importance of taking into account the evolutionary response of disease agents when guiding disease management practice in agriculture (Burdon et al. 2014; Zhan et al. 2014).
The chromosomal locations of all the genes were mapped to the genome according to their evolutionary age and disease status and classified into four categories: Old-Non-Disease, Old-Disease, New-Non-Disease and New-Disease.
Understanding the evolutionary origins of disease vulnerability is not a substitute for understanding proximate causes of disease; they are synergetic explanations that together can assist in the search for causes and cures.
From an evolutionary perspective, human disease genes tend to have particularly ancient origins [ 3- 6], suggesting that disease-causing mutations are more often identified in "older" genes.
Analysis of the evolutionary constraints of disease genes, as indicated by human-chimpanzee KA/KS values, when categorised by the severity of disease displays a trend of reduction in selective pressure with decreasing severity of disease (Table 5).
